Home › Fruit Desserts › Blushing Apples
Blushing Apples
6 red apples
1½ cups water
1½ cups sugar
Whipped cream
Core the apples. Cook in sirup made of sugar and water, turning so that they will cook evenly until they are tender. Carefully remove the skin, scraping the red pulp from it and pasting on the sides of the apple. Put the apples in a serving-dish. Reduce the sirup to one cup, and add the grated rind and juice of one orange, the juice of one lemon, and if desired, nuts, candied orange-peel, or raisins. Pour sirup over apples and serve with whipped cream.
A straightforward poached-apple dessert whose whole effect depends on the colour transferred from the skins. A few points make the difference between rosy apples and grey ones.
- Choose the reddest apples you can findThe blush comes entirely from pigment in the skin, so a deeply coloured variety with thin skin does the work. Modern supermarket apples bred for storage often have tough, waxy skins that scrape poorly; a farmers-market red is worth the trip.
- Poach gently, not at a boilThe syrup should barely tremble. A rolling boil splits the skins early, the pigment leaches into the syrup instead of staying on the fruit, and the flesh collapses. Reckon on 15 to 25 minutes depending on size and variety, testing with a skewer.
- The hinge: peel while hotThe skins slip off cleanly only while the apples are still hot from the syrup, and the scraped red pulp will only "paste" onto warm fruit. Work with a spoon and a cloth to hold the apple, and do them one at a time, leaving the rest in the pan.
- CoringAn apple corer through the stem end keeps the fruit whole, which is the point of the dish. Do not cut through the base or the apple will slump and take on syrup like a sponge.
- Reducing the syrupThe syrup will be somewhat over two cups once the apples have cooked; taking it down to one takes roughly 10 to 15 minutes at a brisk boil. Add the orange and lemon juice off the heat or at the very end, so the fresh citrus flavour survives.
- SweetnessA cup and a half of sugar to a cup and a half of water is a heavy syrup by current taste. Cutting the sugar to a cup gives a syrup that still poaches properly.
- Yield and servingSix apples, one each. Serve warm or at room temperature with lightly whipped unsweetened cream; the syrup is sweet enough for both.
Whole apples poached in syrup and served under cream run through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery under a run of decorative names, and "Blushing Apples" belongs to a genre of dishes titled for their appearance rather than their contents. What sets this version apart is the frugal trick at its centre: rather than discard the skins, the cook scrapes the coloured pulp from their undersides and presses it back onto the naked fruit, manufacturing a blush that poaching alone would not give. The emphasis on a showy dessert built from six apples, sugar, water and one orange suggests a dish for company, assembled from a pantry rather than a market basket.